persons; for the large proprietors, besides the lands they had secured by purchase from the government, or had wrested from the smaller farmers, claimed enormous tracts to which they had only a squatter's title. So long had they been left in undisturbed possession of these government lands that they had come to look upon them as absolutely their own. In many cases, feeling secure through great lapse of time,—the lands having been handed down through many generations,—the owners had expended large sums in their improvement, and now resisted as very unjust every effort to dispossess them of their hereditary estates. Money-lenders, too, had, in many instances, made loans upon these lands, and they naturally sided with the owners in their opposition to all efforts to disturb the titles.
These wealthy "possessors" employed slave rather than free labor, as they found it more profitable; and so the poorer Romans, left without employment, crowded into the cities, especially congregating at Rome, where they lived in vicious indolence. The proprietors also found it to their interest to raise stock rather than to cultivate the soil. All Italy became a great sheep -pasture.
Thus, largely through the workings of the public land system, the Roman people had become divided into two great classes, which are variously designated as the Rich and the Poor, the Possessors and the Non-Possessors, the Optimates (the "Best "), and the Populares (the "People"). We hear nothing more of patricians and plebeians. As one expresses it, " Rome had become a commonwealth of millionaires and beggars."
For many years before and after the period at which we have now arrived, a bitter struggle was carried on between these two classes; just such a contest as we have seen waged between the nobility and the commonalty in the earlier history of Rome. The most instructive portion of the story of the Roman republic is found in the records of this later struggle. The misery of the great masses naturally led to constant agitation at the capital. Popular leaders introduced bill after bill into the Senate, and
